Tracing your own hand is a right of passage for young kids, but there’s another (arguably cooler) way to turn their hands into art: Draw a hand that looks three-dimensional.
The idea comes from Kinja user MoetaRabona, who posted a link to this tutorial on Youtube in the comments of another Offspring post:
I am not even remotely artistic, so I watched that and thought, “That is so awesome and I bet I couldn’t pull it off.” So, I called my 9-year-old son over, traced his hand, asked him to fetch me a few markers and got to work.
After tracing his hand in pencil, I started making my marker lines. You do this by drawing straight lines across the page until you reach the hand; draw an arc shape over the wrist, hand and fingers, and then straight across the rest of the page. If you’re looking to frame this or give it as a gift, you might want to use a ruler for more precise lines. But if it’s just for your refrigerator, you can simply freehand it, like so:
It doesn’t look like much at the beginning. But as you add new lines in varying colours underneath the original lines, the hand starts to lift off the page.
If you have highlighters in different colours (or markers with a flat edge), that will work best. All I had to work with was my son’s Crayola markers, which worked fine for my test run; but a flat edge would make the lines more crisp.
As I added colours, my son would come and peer over my shoulder periodically to check my work. When I was about halfway done, he gave a little gasp and said, “Wow, that does look like it’s coming off the paper.”
With a ruler, some highlighters and a picture frame, this would be a unique and affordable gift for a parent or grandparent—a keepsake of their little hands while they’re still little.
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